Toady, have you given anything thought at all about knucking down and working on fixing bugs and improving the games stability?
In my experiance, the game crashes on a regular basis. During ragular playtime, I can expect the game to crash 3 or 4 times, if it wasn't for DF hack quicksave, and LNP seasonal saves, i would have lost my progress every single time.
Please, stop whatever features you're working on now and focus on improving the games stability, you don't have to change the game itself, just make it more stable. Please.
The convention is to use (lime) green for questions to Toady so he can locate them while answering (you can update your post to add color).
Stop everything and work on stability isn't an option at the moment. The Premium release has to happen, and there are probably contractual obligations tied to it (including when it has to be released, which Toady has said he wants to do before the end of the year).
I sympathize with you, and would like the stability to be improved as well, but a crucial point is to find the causes of the crashes, and that, typically, requires saves uploaded and linked to on the bug tracker, and those saves would need to reliably show the crashes (rather than the typical situation of crashing often, but with no visible cause, with the same save sometimes crashing almost immediately, and sometimes running for a season without issues).
Crash bugs are the highest priority bugs to fix, but they have to be found first, and often a crashing save isn't sufficient, as it just shows that some structure has been corrupted, with no sign of what caused it (like the raid equipment corruption bug: the symptoms are well known, but the causes are not. Toady has tried to fix it, but since it's still happening there are more causes than the one(s) he dealt with). The time after the Premium release and its inevitable bug fix releases will be a critical time for stability, though.